This makes quite a bit of sense! I have been very fortunate to have a long and mostly enjoyable history of gaming, but there are always times when I know it is best to quit. Those come when I treat the game as work, and they certainly apply beyond games - to reading, to writing (often, quit = come back later!), to all parts of life.
One issue I've had to grapple with is having that feeling (of wanting to quit) appear with my players. I write some interesting games, I think, and yet, it is important to remember that at some point these games come to a natural end, and the players have had a lot of fun but don't want to play anymore. It is time to close things up, thank everyone, take a break and let everyone relax their creative muscles :)
I remember Inferno, a DnD 3.5 campaign that I put about 100 pages of single-spaced raw written material into. And that was just the plottings! There was a set of wiki pages; hand drawings; and endless, endless hours spent poring over dnd books devising the latest villains for my party to face (hint to self: don't do that in the future. Your party will still destroy them in one round and you will face complaints from the fighter that he only hit it five times for 150 damage and then that stupid wizard had to come in and Gate an Elder Wyrm... but I am getting too caught up in the details here :)). And in the end, after a good year-plus of play, it was clear that nobody wanted to go on. The storyline was effectively done and I was dithering, waiting to plot out the final battle to end the campaign in style. And then, one day, the campaign had ended in style - the players had outsmarted and outplayed and out-coordinated the Big Bad and there was nothing for him left to do but to leave in a disgruntled fashion, and nothing left for them to do but retire. I accepted that the ending would be anticlimactic, and I stopped the campaign. In the end, everyone was happy, and now has fond memories of that campaign, that, I think, would have been slightly less fond if I didn't recognize that it was time to quit, for my players and for me both.
I realize this story is not exactly parallel to a Living Campaign, where new players come and go all the time, but it was a nice war-story inspired by your post, so I thought I'd sahre it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-01-14 03:13 pm (UTC)One issue I've had to grapple with is having that feeling (of wanting to quit) appear with my players. I write some interesting games, I think, and yet, it is important to remember that at some point these games come to a natural end, and the players have had a lot of fun but don't want to play anymore. It is time to close things up, thank everyone, take a break and let everyone relax their creative muscles :)
I remember Inferno, a DnD 3.5 campaign that I put about 100 pages of single-spaced raw written material into. And that was just the plottings! There was a set of wiki pages; hand drawings; and endless, endless hours spent poring over dnd books devising the latest villains for my party to face (hint to self: don't do that in the future. Your party will still destroy them in one round and you will face complaints from the fighter that he only hit it five times for 150 damage and then that stupid wizard had to come in and Gate an Elder Wyrm... but I am getting too caught up in the details here :)). And in the end, after a good year-plus of play, it was clear that nobody wanted to go on. The storyline was effectively done and I was dithering, waiting to plot out the final battle to end the campaign in style. And then, one day, the campaign had ended in style - the players had outsmarted and outplayed and out-coordinated the Big Bad and there was nothing for him left to do but to leave in a disgruntled fashion, and nothing left for them to do but retire. I accepted that the ending would be anticlimactic, and I stopped the campaign. In the end, everyone was happy, and now has fond memories of that campaign, that, I think, would have been slightly less fond if I didn't recognize that it was time to quit, for my players and for me both.
I realize this story is not exactly parallel to a Living Campaign, where new players come and go all the time, but it was a nice war-story inspired by your post, so I thought I'd sahre it.